Order guide sequencing in San Diego

#San Diego Release , #Process Automation Designer , #PAD

Earl Duque

3 minute read

You younguns’ have it lucky, back in my day we had to walk uphill five miles and create our own order guide sequencing work-arounds, in the snow!

In order guides, multiple catalog items are ordered in the same request, initiating a request item (RITM) for each catalog item. But for some use-cases, we do not want one request item to begin until another request item is done.

Yes, that’s right, with the San Diego release of ServiceNow Order Guide sequencing is easy and fully flexible!

You can read about it below or watch the Creator Toolbox episode for a live demo:

Installing the plugin

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Look for Order Guide Sequential Fulfillment (com.glideapp.servicecatalog.order_guide_sequencing). If you do not have the Process Automation Designer Core plugin already installed, it will be automatically activated with this plugin.

Generating a new sequence

Go to any order guide that doesn’t already have a new sequence and click the “Generate sequence” UI action:

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The sequencing processes can be re-used later for other order guides that are similar, so name it something descriptive:

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Using a previous sequence

Alternatively, if you want to use an already created sequencing process, you can select it below. If a process is selected on the field, the button next to it allows you load the selected process in Process Automation Designer.

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Working in Process Automation Designer (PAD)

The beauty of this sequencing is that it is configurable in PAD (Process Automation Designer), so it’s highly flexible, no-code, and expandable.

When you first load the new sequencing process, all the items of your Order Guide will appear in Lane 1:

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At this point, if you were to activate this process it would be the same as if it did not exist: all four request items would immediately be executed (you can see “immediately” on the bottom right of each card).

You have three ways to manipulate the sequencing:

By lane

Add another lane (name it as Lane 2 for now) and before you Save and Close the new lane, you will see an option for “When to start” that defaults to “After Previous”:

5 pad 2.png

Letting the new lane run “After Previous” means that it will wait for all the request items in Lane 1 to get to a complete state.

By card’s “When to start”

Similarly, you can click on a card and it will also have the “When to start” option. If you change it to “After Previous,” it will wait for the card above it to get to a complete state before starting.

By card’s “Run condition”

You can also configure an actual condition for when this card should start. Click on the card and clik on “Add condition”:

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You will then be able to say specifically when this card should start, especially if it’s more complex than just “after the previous” card finishes:

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You can also combine “When to start” and “Run conditions” and both must be satisfied for the selected card to start.

Activate

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Using what we’ve learned, you can see in the above example that this order guide, when submitted, will execute in the following sequence:

  1. Lane 1 immediately executes
  2. “Fulfill Daily Bugle T-Shirt” immediately executes as it is part of lane 1
  3. “Fulfill New Camera” immediately executes as it is part of lane 1
  4. Lane 2 (along with the cards in Lane 2) waits for all cards in Lane 1 to complete
  5. Upon Lane 1’s completion, Lane 2 the executes
  6. “Fulfill New laptop” immediately executes as it is part of lane 2
  7. “Fulfill Request software packages” waits for “Fulfill new laptop” to complete
  8. Upon the completion of “Fulfill New laptop,” “Fulfill Request software packages” executes

Don’t forget to Activate your process!

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